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As bad as this is, it gets far worse. Sometime around 2045, Nigeria’s population will pass the United States in size. That’s tens of millions of new Nigerian consumers and job-seekers—who will fuel even more demand for energy. As large as the power gap is today, what will Nigeria’s electricity generation capacity look like in 30 years?

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The graph below compares the United States’ and Nigeria’s historical and projected populations and electricity generation capacity. The US Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that the United States will have around 1,300 GW of power capacity by 2050. Officially, Nigeria has 12.5 GW of installed capacity today. (In practice, the country is really closer to 4 GW of functional capacity.) The Sustainable Energy for All Action Agenda, developed in partnership with the Nigerian government, targets total electricity capacity of 23.5 GW by 2020 and 45 GW by 2030. Yet one estimate puts peak national power demand as high as 213 GW by 2040. In other words, the gap is already a chasm, and looks to get even bigger.

If these predictions are anywhere near accurate, then the implications are colossal. Economic growth and job creation won’t possibly keep up. Electricity is already among the top constraints to firm growth in Nigeria, as pointed out by our colleagues Vijaya Ramachandran and Alan Gelb and in a new paper from UC Berkeley.

This dystopian jobless scenario also creates repercussions for American national security. As I (Todd) argued in recent testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Nigeria is an unavoidable partner in our fight against transnational threats like terrorism, disease, and criminal networks. The specter of a Nigeria that cannot come close to meeting its growing population’s demands for jobs and modern lifestyles—all underpinned by high volumes of energy—should be alarming.

In the push for electricity access in the developing world, many policymakers are trying to figure out where on-grid or off-grid solutions make the most sense. My new paper asks 39,000 consumers in 12 African countries about their energy use and demand. The big takeaway: African consumers don’t view grid versus off-grid as a binary question.

We present results below from a survey of shop owners who are part of the Indian government’s Akshay Urja Solar Shops program. To our knowledge, the Akshay Urja program has not previously been evaluated. These results build on a case study featured in an upcoming CGD policy paper on clean energy access entitled, “Financing for Whom by Whom? Complexities of Advancing Energy Access in India.”

Are some countries too poor to consume a lot more energy? Or is income growth being held back by a lack of reliable and affordable electricity? While there is a strong relationship between energy consumption and income, the direction of causality is often far less clear. One way to estimate unmet demand may be to try to compare pairs of countries—e.g., how much additional energy does Kenya need to reach the level of Tunisia?